Two things we need–and want– in life (Lent Series)

Pix for Lent this week from a peaceful cemetery on the outskirts of Santa Elena.

Cleaning up the wife’s grave with machete. “I miss her every day,” the gentleman told me. “Keep her cleaned up.”

Something to think about in Lent meditation:

The late James Luther Adams, the Unitarian theologian and social ethicist at Harvard, said there are two necessary things in life–“a sense of ultimacy and a sense of intimacy.”

A baby born into babyhood without any affectionate touch and nurturing can’t survive, or if he or she does the result won’t be pretty. Intimacy is a must in life and the more it’s lacking the more are the unhealthy and sometimes totally self-destructive ways we’ll try to fill that emptiness.

I happen to believe, at the risk of being arrogantly presumptuous, that we need, and all desperately want, intimacy with some Ultimate that so many believers of all kinds of faith recognize and address as God. It’s been said that we are born with a God-sized hole deep within us.

Ultimacy and intimacy are definitely needs, and certainly what we all want, don’t we?

For Lent we Christians might do well to mull on where God fits into that ultimacy/intimacy equation–and where and how God fits in into us.